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Apartheid Israel Goes Mainstream

A Conversation with David Harel

That Israel is an apartheid state — certainly beyond the Green Line — and commits outrageously illegal acts against the Palestinian people, seem to have become mainstream ideas.

Views of this tenor pop up frequently these days. In a recent piece in The Forward (an emerging prominent voice for justice in Palestine), liberal Zionist Peter Beinart commented on how “mainstream” Bernie Sanders’ “radical” criticism of Israel has become down in Israel-USA

American Presbyterians have just voted narrowly to divest from three corporations that collaborate with Israel’s permanent occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and the Golan Heights: Hewlett-Packard, Caterpillar and Motorola Solutions.

This was not an endorsement of the Palestinian-inspired, international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, the 1.5 million-member Protestant group noted. Just a call for justice.

Just the other day, some seventy luminaries from the global arts and intellectual community — Patti Smith, Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky among them — called for the right to speak freely about Israel. What with shadowy, no-doubt Israeli-controlled social media groups like Canary Mission on the loose, systematically smearing pro-Palestinian voices across North America, truthful speech about Israel’s crimes can cost you your job, or worse.

Now, another candid call for straight talk about what Israel has become: an op-ed piece by Israeli scientist David Harel and writer/translator Ilana Hammerman in the 29 June edition of the Guardian calling on the international community to hold Israel accountable for its occupation of Palestine.

“It is time for the international community to act decisively,” Hammerman and Harel write. “Substantive external pressure — political, economic and cultural — offers the only chance of emerging from this impossible situation before it is too late. Not a sweeping BDS-style boycott of the country, but diverse, carefully crafted acts of pressure.”

David Harel

While Harel and Hammerman distance themselves from BDS in their Guardian op-ed, David Harel tells me in our audio exchange that the US, Canada and EU should ban the importation of products from Jewish settlements.